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An ode to the women who hold a culture together with their hands. What I learned in a Moldovan kitchen with Elena, Veronica, Mihaela, and a glass of Domno Mihai's Jin de Casa. A reflection on the gospodinã, the making of placinte, and the kind of womanhood that gets to be more nuanced than the versions we are most often handed. From Lu Johnson, founder of Mending Miles Co.

Written by – Lu Johnson, Founder and Curator at Mending Miles Co. From my very first sip of crisp Cricova wine in Gaithersburg, Maryland nearly a decade ago, Moldovan wine became a quiet beacon in the sky. At the time, I didn’t know where it came from. I just knew how it made me feel. Curious. Grounded. Drawn in. That feeling stayed with me long enough for me to eventually take the adventure myself. To follow the thread back to the true source of the Moldovan wine experience.

My uprooting was not casual. It was the bold, trembling decision to stop delaying the things I secretly dreamed of but was almost too shy to pray for. Less than six months before clearing out my apartment and deciding what still belonged in my life as a domestic violence surviving widow, I told my father the plan. I had just returned from Gabon for my grandmother’s burial, and something shifted. I told him that in fourteen months, I would quit my job and uproot my life back

After loss, joy can feel like a visitor that may not stay long. For years, that is the belief that drove me. I was careful not to laugh too loud, dream too big, or ask for too much. I was afraid joy would leave. Then I started finding myself alone on travels, yet somehow surrounded, by joy, by love, by life happening in the most surprising ways. Joy I never had to beg for found me. I did not have to whisper so it would not flee.

It took walking through an abusive marriage and facing a loss by suicide to realize that I was looking for healing in all the wrong spaces. The years that followed were a collage of building and losing, trying again, and finally saying no more and asking, “God, what is the life You want for me?” It took me the better part of a decade to recognize that life will keep giving you the same exam